“One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: I will send you the Holy Spirit who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon. For He willed to make them Christians, not astronomers.”

– Saint Augustine, regarding Genesis chapter one.

In Genesis one we see what can best be described as a “counter-myth,” a story that intentionally resembles myths that proceeded it, the geo-centric cosmology of culture that surrounded it (as the above picture shows), but is crafted through the covenant relationship with God the people had in order to counter pagan ideas of worshiping the wrong things like kings or the sun. Thus, the idea that Genesis one has “mythic” qualities does not disprove its enduring theological worth. Far from, it shows its incarnational beauty. This passage is offered in the form or medium of a nonscientific counter-myth (which is how the ancient people thought), yet its enduring message or substance is that God is creator, nothing else is, the creation is good, life-giving ordered, and beautiful, and humans are made in God’s image, designed to inherent dignity and to find themselves in him’s love.

Genesis one becomes a scandal to people who refuse to take their hermeneutical responsibility seriously. Young-earth creationists and other creationists assert that this passage should be taken as a literal scientific description of the earth. However, as we will see, I get frustrated with creationists, because for all their talk of taking the text seriously, they do everything possible to dismiss the actual details of the text. Creationism is really an arbitrary picking and choosing of what Genesis says and how it says it in order to make the doctrine of creation about something that is quite incidental.

There are some very good reasons not to take Genesis one as offering a scientific description of the creation of the world. Not doing so is the most consistent way to interpret it. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if we do take it as a historical description of the material origins of us and the cosmos, we force the text to contradict itself, reducing a literalistic strategy to absurdity.

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